or, how some painted lines in bold colors turned me into an artist and got me to burning man
In early 2016 I visited the Whitney in their new building in Chelsea for the first time. I don’t particularly remember why I picked that destination. The big exhibit at the time was a massive Frank Stella retrospective, starting from his early all black paintings all the way to his crazy late 3d sculptures.
I was instantly smitten. I’d always loved stripes and bold colors (there’s a hideous and ill-advised IKEA duvet I owned for many years after college that can attest to this). But I’d never made the connection to abstract expressionists. And more importantly, I’d never seen art before and thought “I could [and want to] make that”
In a little glass case, tucked away on the way to the bathroom, I saw a set of six little paintings called the Benjamin Moore series. For some reason I believed that they were a late commision from Benjamin Moore, done by the artist in his hay years for cash which made them seem even more approachable and copyable.
I later learned these are super important pieces from the early 60s that signaled his movement into color and away from black, and also possibly into more reproducible paintings? The ones at the Whitney were the set that Andy Warhol had bought
I was possessed of the idea that I should make a copy of these, and for maybe only the second time in my adult life, picked up art tools and began to figure out the process. I found it meditative to work on them, and satisfying to combine my engineering brain – calculating the ratios and laying down formal grids and coming up with techniques for using tape.
After a bit I grew bored of the repetitiveness of making these lines and moved into making digital versions of them, which were my first foray into digital art.
But I didn’t get to the part about why these pieces saved my life and got me to Burning Man.
There are a number of Frank Stella paintings that are done on irregularly shaped canvases (the most famous of which is probably the protractor series). When I asked my friend Matt Broach about shaping canvases, he said “don’t do that, it’s a pain.” So instead I found a CNC router at NYC Resistor to make wood cutouts for copying protractors
NYC Resistor overlaps pretty heavily with parts of the burner scene. At their spring showcase, I ran into an old co-worker from Google who told me I had to go to the Burn. I’d wanted to go since I was a teenager but had always been too scared of drugs on the playa. For some reason, I was ready to receive it then and started looking for tickets and a camp.
What came after that is a whole other story. In short, though, the person I am today – making leather, exploring art, trying to figure out how to build community, queer identified – all follows from my trip to the Burn, and in my narrative, all goes back to those brightly colored striped canvases at The Whitney.
p.s. I never did make those protractor paintings, and I think an ex girlfriend might have convinced me to throw away the shaped pieces of wood a few years later.